R7,000.00

Told from the perspective of a chess piece ordered to go behind enemy lines and sabotage their data on the game, Mitchell Messina’s ‘Kasparov’s Knight’ reimagines Game 2 of the 1997 rematch between IBM’s Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov as the setting in which two linked ideas play out. The first asserting that Kasparov’s erratic movement of his Queen’s Knight during the match was an attempt to produce an excess of data on the piece and misdirect the focus of Deep Blue's algorithms and the second questioning the comprehensibility of information. Together, Messina presents these ideas as a clumsy wrestling with the opaque logic of a program and an imprecise attempt at hacking the unknown.

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Mitchell Gilbert Messina was born in 1991 and graduated with his BFA form the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2013. Messina works primarily as a video artist, producing 4K prose through hi-res found images, watermarked stock footage, repurposed 3D models and royalty-free foley libraries. The videos attempt to strip down narrative structures until they're precariously balanced on a handful of captions, pngs, wavs, fbxs and mp4s, all jostling for attention and floating in and out of frame. His work has been included in many group and solo exhibitions internationally, including Go Away Mitchell (2017) and RAMP (2016) at Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town; and New Voices (2015) at WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery, Cape Town.
Mitchell Gilbert Messina currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.